Wishful thinking on Palestine

The Economist has yet one more wishful thought, among so many right now, for how to break the logjam in Palestine during the summit in Annapolis.

Mr. Palestine

Mr. Bush, the Economist reasons, must take charge and tell the Israelis and Palestinians what's-what on a workable peace plan.

"In this speech Mr Bush needs to set out forthrightly America's own plan for dividing Palestine. That would mark an historic change. In the past—in Madrid in 1991, for example, and at Camp David in 2000—the Americans asked the Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their differences on their own. But they can't. The gap is too wide, and even when their respective leaders want to narrow it neither dares move towards the other for fear of the uproar from the ideological bitter-enders at home. The existence of an American blueprint that commanded international support would, however, immediately transform the political dynamic of both societies, fortifying the moderates and pushing the hardliners to the margins.

Although it would be too much to expect Mr Bush to unfurl a map at Annapolis, he could come quite close. For a start, he should make it clear that when America talks of a two-state solution, it has in mind a border based on the pre-1967 line. Three years ago Mr Bush said in a public letter to Ariel Sharon that it would be unrealistic to expect Israel to evacuate all the dense settlement blocks it has planted in the West Bank. Fine. But since most settlers live close to the old border, he can now tell Israel that it cannot keep more than a few percentage points—say 5% or so—of the West Bank, and that it must offer the Palestinians land from its own side in compensation. On refugees, Mr Bush should say, as Bill Clinton did, that their right to “return” should be exercised in the new Palestine and not in pre-1967 Israel: that is a bitter pill but it is the logic of a peace based on partition. And Israel too must accept a bitter potion: Jerusalem, the beating heart of both peoples, will have to be the capital of both.

If Mr Bush gives this speech, Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas will wax furious. They might agree with him in their hearts, but if only for domestic political consumption they will have to accuse the American president of setting an ambush, bullying the little guys, prejudging the final-status issues and riding roughshod over the views and rights of the people most directly affected. These fulminations can be safely ignored. Israel and the Palestinian territories alike are full of politicians who will tell you knowingly but off the record that only a deal along the lines described above stands the remotest chance of bringing permanent peace. It is high time the superpower and the rest of the world threw their weight behind such a plan. The photo-op at Annapolis may be just the place to do it."

It's a sweet idea.

But the truth is that the resolution of Israeli-Palestinian peace is both more simple and more complicated than all of that.

The details of a peace plan most definitely need to be worked out.

But that's not the real problem.

All that haggling reflects deep-seated bitterness, anger, hatred, and hostilities from the history of this long-running 60+ year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the parties were committed to forgiving that history and all its ugly realities and to seriously make a peace agreement happen, it would happen.

What is needed is for the Palestinian leadership, in Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian people, and the Israeli leadership, in Ehud Olmert, and the Israeli people, including his more hawkish coalition partners, to genuinely commit themselves to peace and to figuring out whatever needs to be figured out to make that happen.

Statehood, borders, right of return, settlements, security and counterterrorism, Jerusalem. All of these issues can find resolution, and only find resolution, after the parties have committed themselves to peace. And no taking charge or strong-arming from the White House ever would, could, or should try to substitute for that more honest commitment. It just could never happen that way. Because the genuine cooperation of all parties will be needed for as long as that peace is to be expected to last, hopefully for as many generations as Israelis and Palestinians have future generations.

Everything else is wishful thinking by those with too much confidence, you might call it hubris, or arrogance, in the ability of authority, power, force, and aggression to resolve more problems than they really can.

You cannot have peace, like any other idea or matter of conscience that you want to sustain itself, without genuine commitment from those who are to engage peacefully. It's just not possible. If people are not committed to peace, or any other goal you have for them, they will perpetually undermine that peace or anything you want for them to be committed to and accomplish. The more you fight to force people to take on a good cause, no matter how good the cause, they will resist and fight you back for as long as you take up that route. And that is why freedom, conscience, and self-determination and self-governance, and not force, are the most serious animating ideas in the history of humanity. These are the ideas that are the namesake of liberal democracy and liberal democratic thought. And it is those values and those ideas, not the foolish notion of force as a governing philosophy, that will dig humanity out of the rut that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the larger repressive and regressive rut that the world faces today.

The writing is so clearly on the wall on this matter that I can hardly believe that anyone would miss it. Except that their hearts are often so cluttered with bitterness, anger, hatred, and hostilities that they just can't see anything else, sometimes. It is foolish. It is ugly. And it is just who we are, right now. Until we face this reality. And the destruction it has wrought.

But the destruction will not end until we begin to do so.

And no strong-man, not even George Bush, could possibly decide otherwise.